Getting Started Organizing for the Disconnected

While scrolling my Bluesky feed the other night I saw someone post All You Fascists Bound To Lose and was immediately transported to 2016 when I did the same thing before quitting Facebook the next day after the election was called. I was in an awkward place, radical politics spoke to me but I wasn't connected to any scenes or people who were directly involved. I didn't have any community involved in organizing (and at the time I wasn't able to recognize what did exist) but I wanted to get started doing something. In the intervening 8 years I've been involved in a number of local organizing projects. If you're reading this, I hope that my experience can help you in some way!

😮‍💨 Advice

I was motivated to write this because of this post. I think there's nothing particularly wrong with this advice but it makes a lot of assumptions that I don't think carry to every single setting, so I'm going to qualify my advice.

• I assume you're not locally connected to people who are doing radical political organizing.

• I assume you're not in a place that has any large explicitly leftist organizations (at least that you know about).

• I assume you don't want to make organizing work your career

Joining Any Project

The first project I joined was a low barrier (you don't have to be sober) emergency shelter, where I worked 2 shifts a week for a winter and attended city council meetings to help advocate for the zoning variances required to keep the shelter open. I just needed to be able to show up and make sandwiches, make beds, clean up, and talk to folks.